Internet Freakshow

Sad Satan

Internet Freakshow - Sad Satan

Some people think the dark web or the deep web is just Hollywood fiction, but I can assure you it is very real. It is used for a variety of things that we’ll likely get into in future episodes of Internet Freakshow, but the one we’ll be discussing today is using it for distribution of low-budget, independently produced video games. Namely horror-themed video games.

On June 25, 2015, a YouTube user named Obscure Horror Corner uploaded video to his channel of this bizarre video game named Sad Satan. The channel owner claimed to have downloaded the game from the deep web, using a service called Tor. If you’re unfamiliar, Tor can be considered a sub-internet. It uses the same internet that you’re used to using, but by connecting to Tor it anonymizes data and connection info. The name comes from an abbreviation of “The Onion Router”, which is a play on all the many layers of an onion. Similarly, Tor uses many layers to hide internet traffic, allowing users to surf the internet anonymously as well as set up destinations online that are only accessible while anonymously surfing with Tor. Websites that end with .onion, as opposed to .com or .net, are easy to pick out as Tor websites. While .onion websites are not officially sanctioned by most internet providers, Tor can intercept these requests and serve websites at that address.

So with a bit of background out of the way, let’s move back to Sad Satan.

Obscure Horror Channel says that, through an anonymous tip on his YouTube channel, he found and downloaded this game. The game’s origins were a total mystery, attributed only to a random forum post by a person known only as “ZK”.

A user claiming to be ZK later emerged on 4chan, claiming that the version distributed by Obscure Horror Channel was not the “real” Sad Satan, and he included a link to a new version. Users who played this version complained that the version made their computers become very sluggish, or crash. Even users who took great care in protecting their systems, playing the game through virtual machines or live USB disks, experienced this issue. This version, unlike the one posted by Obscure Horror Channel, contained may images of hardcore, gruesome gore as well as child pornography.

It is one of the more unfortunate parts of the deep web that it is used to distribute content like child porn and gruesome imagery. In fact, Obscure Horror Channel was so concerned about unintentionally distributing such works that, when asked to reveal the original source of the game, he gave a .onion address that could not possibly exist. When pressed further, he revealed that he gave away a wrong web address on purpose to protect himself and others that may accidentally get child pornography or disgusting images they would rather not get.

This is the first of many holes in Obscure Horror Channel’s story. I understand not wanting to give out the original URL of the game download, but why distract with a fake one? Why not just say that you were not going to give it out? It seems purposefully and willfully misleading, making you wonder what else in the story may prove to be false with a little more digging.

So let’s get into the game content itself.

The walkthrough is still available on YouTube and it is quite disturbing. Maybe the mysterious background of the game makes it creepier. The background music is very creepy ambient sounds, but sometimes breaks into pre-recorded speech that we will get into in a moment. The images themselves are mostly black and white, very grainy and gritty. Sort of like imagery you’d find in that creepy video from The Ring. There is just something generally unsettling about playing the game.

In fact, it’s barely even a game at all. It’s just a POV game, where you see through the eyes of a player, and walk down hallways. In traditional games, you’d be solving puzzles or navigating mazes, or killing enemies. None of those are factors here. You just walk down obvious pathways. Sometimes text pops up on the screen, written in English or bizarre symbols.

According to wikipedia, the “game” ends when a child starts following you. Without any means of defense, the child will always kill you and the game will end. This wasn’t clear to me while watching the walkthroughs, and I wasn’t brave enough to download or play the real game.

Similar to the video we covered in the very first episode of Internet Freakshow, there are lots and lots of encoded messages in Sad Satan. They range from innocent to disturbing, even in the “clean” version which lack the gore and child pornography.

Imagery in the clean version include Jimmy Savile and Margaret Thatcher at an event for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, however Jimmy Savile is a known sexual abuser. It also shows an image of Rolf Harris dressed as Santa Clause surrounded by children. Rolf Harris is currently convicted on 12 counts of indecent assault. There is another image of Roman Polanski, a film director accused of sexually abusing young girls in the 70’s. These images have weird connections to child abuse and sexualization of children, however when just looking at the images they are meaningless. You really have to know the source of these images to be disturbed by them. There’s also unrelated images of druids at Stonehenge and lady justice holding her scales.

The audio is more disturbing than the imagery in my opinion. Some are relatively innocent, like audio from Russian and Polish numbers stations, but the audio is distorted and slowed down to a disturbing and uncomfortable point, even if the content itself isn’t disturbing. There’s some reversed and distorted music, including Stairway to Heaven by Led Zepplin, and a song called Lynch Mob by a band named KMFDM, one of the favorites of the Columbine shooters. There’s audio both backwards and forwards of Charles Manson saying, “If I started murdering people, there'd be none of ya left.” This is Charles Manson during an MSNBC interview. There’s other small snippets of more audio from this same interview as well. There is audio of screaming, crying, and sobbing with no known origin.

Back to those break screens where we see both plain English phrases as well as encoded text, we seem to have answers to what most of those say as well. In what looks like Latin, it says, “In the name of our god Satan, Luficer on high”. Later in an encoded cypher, it says, “I can track you. You are on my list. 5 victim”. Another cypher reads, “Expose everything, I know you, BBC failed, All hidden”.

So that’s the basics of this bizarre game. Because of the nature of the game and the videos and the sketchy story by which it came into the world, it is hard to track down the source of it. There’s no real evidence it came from the dark web, or evidence it came from the YouTuber Obscure Horror Corner, either.

There is some reason to believe that the game was created by Obscure Horror Corner itself. Namely, the sketchy story itself and the immediately apparent lies about the origins. If he was trying to protect people from accessing the game because of the “dirty” version which contained child pornography and gruesome images, as well as potential viruses, that makes total sense to me. But then why lie about a URL? The lie lends credence to all of this being a lie.

But why lie about it? Some of assumed this whole thing was an effort to use internet mysteries to drive traffic to his YouTube channel. This is possible. Sad Satan is his most viewed video and has taken on a life of its own on the internet. But it’s also the last video he produced, seemingly scared away from more production by the insanity that it caused. Similarly, he was an active reddit user but stopped posting shortly after the videos started being picked apart. If his goal was to bring attention to his channel, he certainly succeeded. But maybe he wasn’t equipped to deal with the aftermath.

There’s other spurious evidence that OHC created this game himself, but a lot of it is just assumptions people are making based on previous behavior of the poster, some comments he’s made across YouTube and Reddit, and conclusions drawn from his timeline of claims and posting gameplay.

For the conclusion of Sad Satan, please stay tuned after these words from our sponsors.

In the end, no one really knows where this game came from or who produced it and why. All we have are assumptions. If you’re asking me, I think Original Horror Corner produced this game himself in an effort to drive traffic to his channel, but the popularity of it produced nefarious piggy-backers who used this popularity to produce a “dirty” version, containing illegal imagery and computer viruses. And this is why we can’t have nice things in this Freaky Internet of ours. Maybe Original Horror Corner got spooked by people using his work to distribute viruses and pornography, and left YouTube and Reddit because he felt somewhat responsible.

These are just wild guesses of course. That’s really all we have to go on here, unfortunately. One of the great things about the internet is when media produced sort of takes on a life of its own. Other internet dwellers are inspired by work or the popularity, jumping on the bandwagon to cash in on the success or build on the mythology of the original. But that also means you lose some control of your creations. In my opinion, Original Horror Corner lost control and decided to abandon ship. I don’t blame him. But unless he fesses up, the world may never know.